I have been doing a little work with Microsoft’s Azure platform recently. A common requirement is that you want a VM which is internet-accessible with a custom domain, for which the best solution is to create a A record in your DNS pointing to the IP number of the VM. In order to do this

Microsoft has introduced SSD storage for Azure VMs. This is a catch-up with Amazon which has been offering this at least since June 2014. It is an important feature though, and now in preview. The SSDs are part of the Azure storage service but can only be used for disks attached to VMs, not for

Last week I was in Las Vegas for my first visit to Amazon’s annual developer conference re:Invent. There were several announcements, the biggest being a new relational database service called RDS Aurora – a drop-in replacement for MySQL but with 3x write performance and 5x read performance as well as resiliency benefits – and EC2

Microsoft’s Jason Zander has published an account of what went wrong yesterday, causing failure of many Azure services for a number of hours. The incident is described as running from 0.51 AM to 11.45 AM on November 19th though the actual length of the outage varied; an Azure application which I developed was offline for

This will be unnecessary for Azure experts, but I have seen some misunderstanding on this point, hence this post.

A “web site” is a unit of service on the Azure cloud platform which represents a web application hosted on IIS, Microsoft’s web server (but see below). You write a standard ASP.NET application and deploy it.

“It’s like a Microsoft developer event back when they were good,” one exhibitor here at Xamarin Evolve in Atlanta told me, and I do see what he means. There is plenty of buzz, since Xamarin is just three years old as a company and growing fast; there is the sense of an emerging technology, and

How important is the Azure portal, the web-based user interface for managing Microsoft’s cloud computing platform? You can argue that it is not all that important. Developers and users care more about the performance and reliability of the services themselves. You can also control Azure services through PowerShell scripts.